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Weekly shows every Tuesday – since 2013!

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-Sam has a frustrating story about working with a VoIP provider he shares a long relationship with. An issue with the client’s quality of service on their phones goes into a 2 year sago with an annoying fix in the end.

-To add some humor to his stories, Sam shares a very funny story about a late night visit from a user in need.

-Not a show goes by without Joe sharing an annoyance of a feature or lack thereof. In this case, he discusses “pop over” functionality in Messages. Sam gives a tip back to Joe.

-A tip that Sam just learned is that he can charge his iPhone from his iPad Pro using the USB-C to lighting cable. There are a variety of features of the USB-C ports as explained here:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209186

-If you are going to cover your camera with tape, at least make sure it’s not clear tape.

-In his off time, Joe sits in his camper and ponders about security. So he has some theories on malware.

-Sam decides to bring up a rather embarrassing story of how he missed the obvious

-As Joe & Sam start to go down the road of managing a team, one point that Sam brings up is the way mistakes are made. Joe goes back and forth about holding employees accountable and making excuses for them.

-Making mistakes with employees often cannot be reversed

-Managing the employee relationship is extremely difficult to get right, as Sam and Joe both have realized over the years

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-He addresses use of a UniFi Cloud Key and how he goes the route of using an in-house controller on a Mac mini in his office.

-By doing so, he then manages all of his clients as “sites” in the controller. He then charges his clients an annual fee to maintain this for them

-A point of interest is how to migrate devices from one controller to another. More testing may be needed on Sam’s part.

-Remie shares a tip on creating users for clients, which involves setting up credentials for the user instead of having them jump through hoops to create a new account.

-Finding difficulties in implementing an SSL certificate for his controller, Remie created a guide and shares it with listeners.

-For his fees, he offers to do firmware upgrades as well.

-One hurdle that he found himself hitting, was the issue of needing to do a “Set Inform” twice to adopt devices on a controller that is not on-site. Ubiquiti confirmed the need for this method.

-Joe and Remie put their fancy pants on and discuss DHCP options

-As the group discusses the topic of using secondary ports on the AC-Pro APs, Sam makes mention of a hardware limitation where speeds of the AP will represent the top speeds of the device connected to the secondary port. So if a device connected can only operate at 100 Mbps, ALL devices connected to that AP will hit that cap.

-Ubiquiti has an impressive line of products in their UniFi line

-Joe has a PSA about power cycling the UniFi equipment

-Offsite configuration in a staging area is a popular method of setup, although depending on equipment used, it can present its challenges.

-As Joe encountered issues with VPN setup, he had access to Ubiquiti’s 24/7 chat support

-The UniFi Security Gateway (USG) has its place in some installations but may not fit the bill everywhere

-Mounting methods of the access points is an important factor to be aware of that is addressed in the conversation

-Before wrapping up, Remie gets into the confusing naming convention for USB and current speeds. He also advises on purchasing the proper cables.

-With equipment like this that require periodic firmware updates, Jerry poses a question of how to handle that with clients that are time & materials. Do you proactively reach out? How do you handle billing?

-We could not have an episode of Command Control Power without a Jerry client impersonation

-Mesh networks like Eero are good alternatives to more complex setups in residential scenarios. However, Sam knows “zero about the Eero”.

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-It's almost the time of year again for the ACEs Conference. This week Justin Esgar joins Joe, Jerry, & Sam to talk about ACEs 2019 - to be held June 4-6 in Kansas City, MO (NOT to be confused with Kansas City, KS)

-Work/life balance was a theme of ACEs 2018 that Joe really loved. Both Joe & Sam attended the morning yoga session on day 1.

-Justin's wife as well as his Board of Directors have been key to making ACEs successful: Alan Hancock, Adam Engst, Andy Espo, Will O'Neal

-After feedback from previous years, Justin and his team have implemented a new theme where participants will be able to meet in small groups and get feedback and help from their peers.

-The Keynote this year is Sgt Major Fenton Reese

-Brian Best is back for year 5. Will he be presenting in a tuxedo?

-Justin's own company, Virtua Computers, was changed dramatically from the conference and his yearly revenue reflected this.

-One piece of advice is to research and go all in on the tools you will need for your clients. Whether it's Addigy for RMM (Remote Monitoring & Management), Zendesk for ticketing, JumpCloud for SSO (Single Sign On) or Apple Business Manager.

-Automating and perfecting your processes is not only going to make your clients successful, but it will set your staff up for success as well.

-Justin shares some of how he bills his monthly services

-Virtua also does Dark Web scanning for his clients. He uses ID Agent for that service

-Keeping an ongoing relationship with the client is an important factor that makes those money conversations that much easier

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-Jerry has some clients with MacPractice and he has some concerns with their recommendations for Dolly Drive. Joe chimes in on his experiences.

-Since Sam is relatively new to syncing Desktop & Documents to iCloud, he was looking for a way to stop specific subfolders from syncing to iCloud. He found that adding the suffix of .nosync to a folder would remove it from iCloud.

-On the heels of naming conventions discussions, Jerry has a client that named folders with all the special characters that tend to wreak havoc on an OS. He got the old line “it wasn’t a problem before” from the client.

-Sam’s client had what they thought was an issue with a UniFi mesh device. The answer was a lot more simple than expected.

-Whenever a client messes with DNS, it’s a recipe for disaster. And Jerry’s client was no exception.

-A need from one of Jerry’s friends turns into the discovery of a line of products from Ten One Design. He ends up getting his friend the Blockhead, which turns the Apple power brick sideways to the socket. Check them out for a variety of other ingenious products like the Stella or Wifi Porter.

-Listeners of Command Control Power can get a very generous 20% off their order by using the code “Command” at checkout.

-It’s the simple things. Joe shares a feature of the Amazon Prime app on iOS that just makes sense and he wonders why other video streaming apps don’t do this.

-Jerry recommends troypoint.com for use with an Amazon Fire Stick

-Joe has a new segment/corner/pop quiz called “Apple should have told us”. His story starts with a local iPhone encrypted backup with a lost backup password. Apple does have a knowledgeable article on this topic: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220#help

-Sam had to turn his back on his Mac recently because his 2016 MacBook Pro had to be sent in for repair under the keyboard repair program. He reported very positive results overall. A couple of things he missed were related to not syncing Desktop & Documents to iCloud and some websites not displaying as expected in iOS.

-Inevitably, the conversation steers towards Joe’s “janky” 15” MacBook Pro and the built-in cooling vent. He also talks about the repair performed in office, thanks to tools and guides from iFixIt.

-Jerry comes up with a new Command Control Power drinking games

-Joe specced a new MacBook Air for a client, who had almost 500GB of data. On the MacBook Air, this necessitates a $1000 upgrade to 1.5TB SSD. For comparison, he specced a MacBook Pro 13-inch Touch Bar & Touch ID with 1TB SSD (16GB memory in both) and found that the price was exactly the same: $2599. The MacBook Pro has the Touch Bar and much better performance, but for the same price the MacBook Air has better battery life and portability, more storage as configured and no Touch Bar which might be benefit to some people. So it comes down to trade-offs. See Gruber's take and the video comparison he linked to by Quinn Nelson

-Joe’s tip of the week: earn Apple Gift Cards on the Barclaycard Visa® Signature with Apple Rewards. 3 points per dollar on all purchases made at Apple or iTunes, 2 points per dollar on restaurant purchases, and 1 point per dollar on all other purchases

-Hazel by Noodlesoft is a product recommended by Jerry to create rules for folders. For instance, Jerry has a folder on his Desktop of his Mac that can do OCR, specifically with PDFs. He uses that along with PDF Pro from Smile Software.

-Joe gets giddy when talking about Automator and AppleScript. He talks up using AppleScript to manage his status board at his office, where he posts photos of his adventures with Ashleigh. Jerry is concerned about how his staff reacts to Joe living the high life while they are at work.

-Joe revisits his clients issue with the Share menu on an iMac Pro: the Share menu would appear, but it would be frozen, and the only way to dismiss would be to quit the app in question. At long last, the problem is solved. Joe shares the exciting conclusion.

-Joe shares the solution to his longtime issue logging into sites with untrusted self-signed certificates. The message would show "This Connection Is Not Private" and you could click Show Details, then click Visit this Website, which would prompt for the login password. However, then it tries to reload the page and the same thing happens (This Connection Is Not Private...). Solution: use Private Browsing. This seems to solve the issue in the future, even when visiting a site in a normal browsing session i.e. without Private Browsing.

-Not to bring the show down, Sam shares two stories of how his company and two separate clients parted ways. Both for different reasons but it led to a rough start to 2019. The team discusses the breakups and the benefit of ridding yourself of bad relationships before they bring you further down.

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Topics:

-Back from the holiday, Joe, Jerry, & Sam had a chance to meet up in the real world

-Jerry can name all three wise men but Joe & Sam draw blanks

-Joe “re-learns” a lesson about taking a red-eye across the country

-Surprisingly, nobody received any tech for the holidays but Jerry purchased a Sonos subwoofer for himself and has a new interest in the Amazon Fire Stick

-Jerry may need to update his TV to match all his audio tech. In that discussion comes about the old remote controls, like the one Sam used growing up…

-New Year’s Resolutions:Joe - Going back to basics and focus on the fundamentals (ie. billing out as efficiently as possible, migrating more clients to managed services). On the personal side, developing a routine while living nomadically.Sam - Would like to travel less for both business and personal reasons. On the business end, it makes it difficult to run if he is not always there to attend meetings or give directives. On the personal side, he would like to attend more events for the children.Jerry - He is interested in growing his business and increasing revenue

-Jerry also has a plan to be organized moving forward and it includes the use of DayOne, an Apple friendly journaling app. DayOne can collect notes, images, audio recordings in journal entries and help organize your life and business.

-Joe shares his thoughts about how malware appears to be a more persistent problem with client devices.

-Jerry talks about using that term and clarifying between various naming conventions (malware, adware, virus, worm, etc.)

-This all leads to an issue Joe was having with a persistent Safari homepage that would not change back. As it turns out, a security feature from Apple disallowing “synthetic clicks” was not allowing Joe to resolve this issue remotely. Thanks to Patrick Fergus (@foigus) on Slack for the assistance.

-Sam brings back the MDM conversation when talking about how Apple is providing ways to be more preventative from a security standpoint.

-Joe & Jerry have similar issues with built in applications not running correctly on older operating systems

Topics:

-Sam shares his thoughts on seeing a fellow customer at a local diner and what his business and life might be like

-Sam’s story reminds Joe of a time when the two of them used to get together for their breakfast meetings

-After being around a long time, old clients seem to find their way back around

-What kind of stance should be taken when clients don’t follow your recommendations?

-A possible client that Sam is negotiating with is being severely under-billed by their current tech company. This causes a challenge for HCS to quote the job.

-As Joe says, we compete on value not price. And Sam loves when potential clients are shopping around and don’t go with him at first. Then they come back around after dealing with a “cheaper” solution.

-Sam shares deep thoughts about chance meetings, life decisions, and how the show has changed his life and his business.

-”I should have known this”: Sam sheepishly shares how he was not aware of being able to easily move the cursor on the screen on an iOS device

-At a network installation for a client, Joe notices a distance issue with PoE access points and how the speeds vary.

-After dealing with a variety of Ubiquiti products, Joe has a good deal of information to share. Within that same discussion, billing for managing alerts, updates, etc. for this equipment has come front of mind for Sam.

Topics:

-A big thank you to Jonathan Mann for writing the new theme song for Command Control Power! -A little bit about Jonathan Mann: A little bit about Jonathan Mann:https://www.jonathanmann.net/-Jonathan Mann writes a song a day. He holds the Guinness World Record for Most Consecutive Days Writing A Song.Jonathan Mann, Song A Day - XOXO Festival (2014) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4fGsyyWF0

-Joe has some follow up about clients trying to circumvent his company’s normal channels of communication

-Sam is able to keep a client but gives up the networking piece due to a situation of “too many cooks” working in conjunction with their A/V team

-It becomes a tricky game to play working with confused clients or those who can’t grasp the answers you give them

-A quick PSA from Sam about updating the Small Cubed Mail Act-On Plug-In for Apple Mail and messages in the Outbox that are scheduled for a future date

-TeamViewer versioning causes some grief as Joe is attempting to work with a client remotely

-Joe tries to avoid accidental eye contact at the random coffee shops he works out of. Jerry goes on a rant about Starbucks wait times and poor ventilation, not to mention the “boint” coffee. The rant calls to mind the days of Jackie Mason.

-Joe has an excellent tip about using affiliate links when doing email marketing like TidBITS

-Based on a listener’s feedback in our Slack channel, Sam recommends SetApp, a subscription service for Mac apps

-Turning on mark down support in secure notes is now a feature of 1Password. Thanks to Joe’s feedback/rant online? Who knows.

-Jerry struggled on-site at a client with an odd Gmail issue with Apple Mail and as it turns out, it was the Keychain.

-One of Joe’s client has an issue where their iCloud outgoing emails are going to spam for recipients. He utilized a blacklist tool to see if their IP or domain was on any blacklists. After working hard to diagnose, it turned out to be the fact that the user was using their ISP’s mail server to send messages.

-FileVault encryption proved to be more difficult for Jerry and it required running Disk Utility from the Recovery partition

-One of Joe’s clients was trying a remote session and found MacHelp Mate!

-Sam addresses the rumors about how he spends his CCP per diem and where he sleeps at night

-Weldon gives us the scoop about his business and how it involves MSP clients as well as an Apple Authorized Training Partner

-Weldon begins a conversation about how to onboard new employees and the team shares their thoughts

-One of the methods that Sam used was to have the new hire document your steps so he/she learns how to create documentation and you get to critique the way they create notes

-Joe has a client that he respects that gave him good unsolicited feedback on his new hire. She became a barometer and may be a future method for vetting potential new employees

-Weldon compares that to a situation where he was brought on board to help vet a new educator being brought into his son’s school

-Sam has a bone to pick with Joe about a new client referral that he cannot shake

-On the topic of referrals, Weldon talks about his good business relationship with Amy McKnight and the team at The Mac Spa

-Joe asks Weldon about his decision to go all in on MSP and how difficult it was at times to say no to potential business

-After heavy experience with companies like Microsoft and Cisco, Weldon realized he was the only one on his team that could handle certain tasks. So it made him sharpen his focus on things that he and his entire team could be awesome at.

-A big congratulations to Weldon for his successful presentation with Randy Saeks at JNUC 2018!

-ACEs Conference is back for 2019! It will be held in Kansas City, MO June 4-6. Visit http://acesconf.com/ccp/ for special pricing for CCP listeners.

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This show is brought to you commercial free, thanks to our Patreon sponsors.

On this episode we welcome long time supporter of the show and owner of Watchman Monitoring, Allen Hancock

-Some news for Allen and the team is that they have hired Ben Mason. You may know Ben from his excellent support at Gruntwork.

-Hiring new staff and remote vs local employees becomes an interesting topic of discussion

-Allen has a big announcement in that they are changing the way they handle Zendesk Tickets. Listen to find out more about Zendesk private ticket creation and how Watchman Monitoring takes full advantage of this.

-Watchman Monitoring can also work with Zendesk’s Essential Plan

-Zendesk Private Ticket creation is the new feature that allowed this integration to happen

-The Watchman Monitoring community forum has been recently revamped. You will no longer receive emails from the forum unless you request to watch a topic or receive responses to your posts. You can also vote on features.

Command-Control-Power

Cmd-Ctrl-pwr is a weekly podcast hosted by three certified members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), drawing from nearly half a century of combined experience operating technology consulting practices.

Command-Control-Power is a weekly podcast hosted by three certified members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), drawing from nearly half a century of combined experience operating technology consulting practices.